CALL IT A DAY - 21 August 2011
21st August 2011
We have friends arriving from London any minute now and I've just prepared a jug of iced lemon verbena tea from a new branch of leaves Gianni left on our outside table this morning. We'll serve it with the last of the vanilla-cream sponge cake that Silvia made for us yesterday. "L'ultima dolce," she said, the last dessert, as we will leave for the sea next Sunday before returning to NY.
But let me tell you about this cake! Silvia brought it over about 6pm, still warm from the oven. It was everything the birthday cake was not: light, simple yet elegant, the ingredients as pure as the love with which she made it. It sat on the plate like a happy cloud and we knew as soon as we looked at it that IT was dinner!
The last 2 days have been so hot it's hard to leave the house after 11 in the morning, the air is heavy with heat and weighs on the lungs. But by the time the heavenly cake arrived a small breeze was stirring the trees and we sat in our deck chairs with iced fennel tea and began to make inroads. Gianni arrived, took one mouthful and like us went straight to paradise.
Yesterday we managed, in spite of the heat, to do the laundry, clean the house and run errands in town which Joel took back to the house while I stayed in the village to get a treatment from Rupert, an Englishman who has lived here for many years. He is, officially, a Doctor of Chiropractics, but more than that he is a healer and over the years he has cured Joel and I of various aches and ailments. He just has it. His wife, Esther, is a Yogi and after the treatment the four of us lunched together in a courtyard restaurant. Stupid with heat we nonetheless managed to eat steamed bream and grilled vegetables while catching up on each other's lives.
In a telephone conversation with a dear friend in London this morning I found myself saying this has been the best summer of my life. Why? she asked. And I said that letting go of the attachment to our Cape house had given us what we'd been craving for years: to live in harmony and tranquility with nature and people. I also said that by letting go of our attachment to our material aesthetic we have discovered how little we need to live a fulfilling life: a couple of deck chairs, some straw baskets, a bit of muslin, some candles.
I lived like this years ago, when my daughter was a toddler and I was a dancer and waitress. But back then it was poverty that had me cover ugly lampshades with a thrift-store scarf and make furniture from wooden crates. And certainly the kind of produce we've been buying here could not be bought with my food-stamps. Not because it cost too much but because it wasn't available.
Now I live this simply by choice, so I do appreciate the difference. All the same, many of those makeshift homes my daughter and I inhabited provided me with a certain amount of joy and pride at what one could create with very little, and I am in many ways grateful for those meagre years. What I see now that was missing from them was the kindness and generosity that we experience here. To be poor in America carried the stigmata of failure - after all, America was the land of golden opportunity. But I feel no shame here and now, living in our one-sheaf-of-wheat-agriturismo house. You can have the villa and the trimmings. Give me a branch of verbena, a box of figs, and a warm cake and let's call it a day.